


Petitio Principii

by idyll



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Community: remix_redux, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-04-11
Updated: 2006-04-11
Packaged: 2017-10-07 10:37:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idyll/pseuds/idyll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remix of <a href="http://sophia-helix.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://sophia-helix.livejournal.com/"><b>sophia_helix</b></a>'s <a href="http://thedoublehelix.org/sophia/ksanti.html">Ksanti</a>. Goes AU at <i>Sleep Tight</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Petitio Principii

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sophia_helix](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=sophia_helix).



The world doesn't stop. Chaos and evil and apocalypses don't stop. Not for anything at all, much less something as cosmically insignificant as a kidnapped child. Angel knows this even before Cordy finally discards her aura of understanding softness and reverts to her typical tough-love persona.

Angel knows it, but hearing it is like a crushing blow, and it's worse even than the loss of Connor was.

"You have to stop," Cordy says. "I know you're Mr. Obsessive Guy. I mean, hello! I _have _met Angelus. But seriously, you have to stop."

He'd tell her that she can't understand, that she doesn't know what he's going through, but she does. She might as well have been Connor's mother. At the very least, she was Angel's partner in taking care of and raising Connor, and even in the midst of his own turmoil Angel can't discount that.

For the first time in months he looks at Cordy, and he doesn't like what he sees. There are dark circles under her eyes, fine shakes that make her hands tremble, and she's lost weight, is back to being too thin for her frame again.

"I can't do this on my own," Cordy tells him flatly. "The visions. The missions. Keeping you from going off the deep end. Watching Fred and Gunn be all cuddly and sweet." She shudders in distaste and Angel almost smiles. "Get your head back in the game, mister."

It takes a few more weeks, but gradually Angel does just that. The first time he actually shows his face for a strategy session again, Cordy takes him aside, squeezes his arm. "It's not giving up. We won't do that, ever. I swear."

"I know."

*

Angel dreams of things he's never seen, will never see, because they've been stolen from him:

Connor's first clumsy, uncoordinated steps towards him (and in his head it would have been a moment just for him and Connor, with everyone else off doing their own things). Connor's first slurred word (which in his mind is "Daddy", but which he thinks Cordy would have influenced so much that in reality it would have been something like Manolo or Prada). The trials and tribulations of potty training (something he read up on when Connor was only a week old, much to everyone's amusement).

When he wakes up, impotent fury colors his vision red, and through the veil of blood there is Wesley, paying for his crime.

*

Los Angeles is on the brink of being sucked down into Hell, literally, by a purebred demon that keeps kicking their asses. It's bad enough that Angel actually calls Sunnydale for help, only to find out that the First is waging a war on all the Slayers and Buffy was on the verge of calling Angel for reinforcements.

Gunn calls it a "massive cluster fuck of epic proportions". Angel just calls it the way their life goes, but thinking about the Slayer line makes him think of Faith, and he gets the idea.

"Angel," she says with a grin. "Long time no see, man."

"Faith."

Her face is sharper, more clearly defined than he remembers, and he realizes just how young she truly was when he first met her. Her voice is raspier, lower, and he imagines he can smell the stale cigarette smoke on her, even though the glass between them blocks any whiff of scent.

"Is this visit about the bitch who got mad money to try and take me out with a funky knife, or the shit I'm seeing on the news about LA?" she asks.

"Yeah."

Faith stares at him, eyes narrowed, and Angel holds her gaze while he hangs up his phone, stands, and steps to the side. Faith nods slowly, drops her phone with careless disregard, and then she takes a running leap and there's a shower of jagged glass, razor fine slivers of which embed themselves in Angel's cheeks.

On the drive back to Los Angeles, Angel fills her in on the details of both looming disasters as she changes her clothes in the backseat and asks some questions before she climbs into the front again.

"You know, I think it's probably a lot worse than you're letting on," she drawls.

Angel frowns. "Los Angeles is getting sucked into a Hell Dimension one neighborhood at a time, starting with Wolfram and Hart. The Watchers have been decimated, and three quarters of the Potential Slayers have been murdered. It's really bad."

"No, yeah, I know that. But there's got to be even more going on. Because, come on. Cordelia and Wes would rather offer themselves up to a purebred demon's mercy than see me again."

"Cordy's not too happy, no," he admits with a shrug. "But she knows we need you."

"And Wes?"

Angel's hands tighten on the steering wheel. "Wesley isn't with us anymore."

"Is he dead?" Faith asks after a pause.

"Not yet."

When he tells her about Wes disappearing with Connor she shakes her head and whistles lowly.

"Jesus. That's seriously fucked up."

Angel's jaw hurts from grinding his teeth. "Yeah," he grits out.

*

They save the day and Los Angeles isn't entirely sucked into Hell. Most of the neighborhoods come back unscathed, but a few come back infested with demons. Fewer still don't come back at all.

They deal with clean up and Faith goes to Sunnydale to help with the First. She comes back to Los Angeles, though, looking worse for the wear in a lot of ways, and takes a suite of rooms in the Hyperion.

It's been more than a year since Connor was taken and Angel still dreams of everyday moments he would have treasured, still wakes up enraged, and sometimes he'll still lock himself in his rooms for days at a time, and drown himself in the loss.

*

The passing of years is marked, as they always are, by battles they win by the skin of their teeth and personal losses that never get any easier to deal with.

Gunn loses his mind for a while but gets it back, dented and caved in, and it takes six months before it knits itself back together. Fred loses two fingers and spends weeks furious with everyone and everything before she straightens those delicate, narrow shoulders of hers and moves forward. Lorne is killed by a demon during a routine case.

There's more, too, but Angel can't bring himself to dwell on all of it and he has to stop there whenever he thinks back.

In between cases, they follow leads that never actually lead to Connor, and Angel learns not to get his hopes up when a tip comes in. Instead he hands it off to the others to investigate and doesn't ask about it again, because it's too hard on them to tell him it was a dead end, and it's too hard on him to hear it.

*

Faith closes the door when she comes into Angel's office. There's a very faint hint of cigarette smoke coming off her and Angel knows she only smokes when she's troubled, so he puts aside the file he's been reading and lowers his legs from his desk.

"What's on your mind, Faith?"

"Been thinking about forgiveness," she rasps and Angel's past being surprised at how easily she speaks about things at times like this, because she only comes to him when she knows for sure she can actually talk about what's bothering her.

"Kind of a broad topic."

"Yeah. I know. Got a call from B yesterday."

Angel clears his throat and reaches out to straighten the papers on his desk. "Really? How is she?"

"You can badger me for gossip later, right now is Faith-time."

Angel's hands still on his desk, unnatural and stiff, before he clears his head and lets it go. "What happened during the call?"

"I just realized...she doesn't forgive me for all that shit that went down. That I did. Won't ever. Then I ran into Cordy in the lobby and, you know, it's the same with her. B wants me to go to fucking Rome and help with the Slayers, and Cordy will let me watch her back when we're on a case, but they don't forgive me."

"They trust you with their lives. And the lives of the people closest to them. That's important."

Faith shrugs, shakes her head and nods all at the same time. "That's not--what I'm saying is, they trust me like that, but they haven't forgiven me. I don't get that. It doesn't make any sense."

Angel has a lot he can say. What he settles on is, "Do you need them to forgive you?"

"I...I don't know." She's frowning deeply, her eyes narrowed in thought. "I just always thought the whole forgiveness thing had to come first."

"They won't ever forgive you," Angel says and watches her flinch and draw back in her chair. "They move on, they go forward, but they don't grant absolution, Faith."

"They're hardasses," Faith mumbles and Angel nods.

"You messed up and they won't let you forget it because you _shouldn't_. But their trust, that's something you've earned, something better."

*

Cordy is the one who tells him. She barges into his room in the middle of the day, wakes him up from a sleep that's gotten progressively more dreamless over the course of months and years.

"We found them," she says simply and Angel knows immediately who she's talking about even though they stopped even telling him about the tips a year ago.

*

Angel thinks about forgiveness and a million other things during the next few days. He ignores the others when they first stare at him expectantly and then ask him impatiently what the hell he's waiting for.

They've all been through so much these last four years and Angel isn't tired and broken so much as he's been worn smooth, like the rosary his mother fingered and worried every day of Liam's life, and one night after his death.

He calls Faith into his office and says, "I want you to go and bring Connor back."

Her eyes go wide, her jaw drops open, and her brow furrows. "What? Why?"

"Because I'm asking you to."

"You gotta do better than that, Angel."

He doesn't, not really, because it's none of her business. Except for the part where he's making it her business by asking her to face down the last person she wants to see to bring Angel's son home where he belongs.

"I _just_ want my son back, Faith."

And it's not much of an answer, except in the way it's the entire answer, and Faith takes a breath and then nods. "Okay. It shouldn't be too bad. No way he'll be expecting me, right? I can steamroll right over him, get the kid and run."

"Exactly."

*

Angel doesn't sleep in the days before Faith leaves, doesn't think he'll sleep again until she comes back with Connor. So he's awake when she calls him in the middle of the night, her voice thin and strained, and Angel can hear her light a cigarette and exhale heavily after he asks her what happened.

"Made contact."

"Did you see Connor?"

"No. Just...just Wes. He looks--different. Got this beard. But it's--it's not just the beard. And he invited me over, Angel. Like I never...did what I did to him."

Angel knew it was unfair to ask her to do this and he feels guilty that it's this hard on her, but it's something Faith needs and he doesn't trust himself to be the one to do it, anyway, so he doesn't offer to go there and finish it himself.

"That's good, Faith. Makes it easier to get the job done."

She sucks in a breath, says, "Fuck you" in a strangled, bitter voice.

"Faith..." Angel doesn't know what else to say, so he closes his eyes, listens to her smoke, and pours himself a glass of scotch.

"He looks like I did," Faith says abruptly. "Lost. He looks lost."

In the past four years Angel hasn't though much about Wes specifically. Oh, he's thought about Wes stealing Connor, about Wes running off and keeping him from Angel, about the things he wants to do to make Wes pay for what he did, but he hasn't thought about _Wes_.

And it's like Faith's words open the door in Angel's head that he's kept locked, and suddenly all he can think about is Wes, on his own, in his entirety. It should be a deluge of thoughts, of memories and emotions, but instead it's something simple: Wes is alone.

Angel's eyes squeeze shut tighter. Wes was part of them, part of this menagerie of flawed individuals that is family, and he walked away from it, from them.

Wes is alone, and Angel is a jagged rock worn smooth by the water, a rosary bead worried to a glossy shine by his mother's fingers.

"I want you to tell him something," Angel says. "Tell him about ksanti."

*

They gather in the lobby, Angel, Cordy, Gunn and Fred, and they leap to their feet when the doors of the Hyperion open. Angel feels the shock ripple through the others when Wes comes in behind Faith, but he's more focused on the sleeping boy in Wes' arms.

Connor. After four years, Connor's here again.

Wes stands still, says nothing, even when Angel walks to him in a daze and lifts Connor out of his arms. Angel holds his son to his chest and it doesn't feel real, that Connor is in his arms again, older but carrying the same scent. Whole and healthy, and secure enough to sleep soundly, peacefully.

Cordy steps up to Angel, sets a shaking hand on Connor's back and Angel can smell her tears, can hear her unsteady exhalation of relief. They turn away from everyone and go upstairs with Connor.

*

Connor screams when he wakes up in Angel's rooms. He calls for his daddy and insists his name is Stephen, and he bites Cordy's arm when she keeps him from running out of the room.

Angel should have expected this, but he didn't, and when he looks at Cordy's pained face he realizes she didn't, either. It would have been too real to think about the adjustment, so they didn't.

Angel takes the squirming child in his arms and walks down the hall. Faith is in Wes' room with him and she puts out her cigarette when Angel comes in. Wes looks miserable and tortured around the scruffiness of his beard, and Angel thinks of the lonely man who stayed for breakfast that first year Angel was in Los Angeles.

When Angel sets Connor down, Wes crouches and opens his arms and Connor tears towards him, throws himself in Wes' arms and sobs against his neck while Wes rubs his back and whispers soothingly until he calms down.

Faith is staring at Angel, saying a thousand things with her eyes, and Angel hears all of them, but he still waves her out of the room, because this doesn't have anything to do with her any longer.

"Faith passed along your message," Wes says when Connor is sleeping again. He's sitting in a chair, stiff and uncomfortable, and Angel is leaning against a wall, staring at his son.

"I figured, since you're here," Angel answers.

"She implied you would...listen. Allow me to explain." Wes' voice is off, his accent slipping between the soft English accent Angel remembers and something flat and monotone that reminds Angel of a newscaster. "I'd like that chance. When you're ready, of course. I hope that one day you'll be able to forgive me, but I know there's little chance of that."

"I won't ever forgive you. You need to know that. If there was a worse way to handle things, I don't know what it might have been."

Wes nods tiredly and Angel looks at Connor, sleeping peacefully once again, and he thinks of Wes leaving them all behind to make sure the most vulnerable member of their family was safe. That truth is a bit overwhelming because Angel hasn't allowed himself to acknowledge Wes' reasoning until now, and the weight of it presses on his shoulders, makes him slide down the wall he's been leaning against. He thought he was being generous, having Faith tell Wes that he would listen, try to understand, but Angel's known all along.

"He'll stay in here with you for the time being," Angel says abruptly, motioning at Connor. "We'll have to ease him into the truth. But for now...for now, he needs you, and I need you to be there for him." Wes nods again, this time with a lift of his chin that says more than words ever could. "I won't ever forgive you," Angel repeats, "but I think I can trust you again."

"That's...more than I expected."

"Me too."

.End


End file.
